Okay, so you have a shiny new iPhone, you’ve got an email address (or addresses) that you’ve used for years, and you want to use (or continue to use) push email. The thing is, the iPhone only does push email via Exchange ActiveSync or Yahoo! mail, no IMAP IDLE. Exchange ActiveSync is fine, but it’s a sledgehammer to crack a nut, is relatively expensive if you want to hook it up to Outlook and you can only have one Exchange account. Yahoo! mail on the other hand is relatively cheap, has POP access to handle the Outlook connection and seems to be a proportional response to the problem at hand. The trouble is, Yahoo! mail won’t let you use your own email address. Or will it? Well, given the title of this post, I suppose the answer is obvious. I’ve searched for quite a while to get to the bottom of this problem and got precisely nowhere until I stumbled on Yahoo! Identities.

Okay, enough preamble, here’s what you do:

Make sure your current email address is working and receiving mail.

Sign-up for Yahoo! Mail (not sure if it has to be a Plus account) and create your @Yahoo.com email address (you won’t need it much).

Go to this page and add an Identity which is your existing email address.

Yahoo! will send an email to that address to verify it’s yours so check your mail and respond to the confirmation.